Heavy Metal Reviews
Heavy metal in all its varieties, and from all eras, is the bread and butter of Kevy Metal, if the name of the site had not given this away yet. All Album of the Week reviews about heavy metal albums published on Kevy Metal can be found right here.
Since I didn’t start properly tagging my reviews until a couple of years in, these aren’t all the heavy metal reviews I have done over the years. If you are looking for something specific, you can always search by band name or release title using the search bar at the bottom of the page.
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Album of the Week 26-2023: Stravaganzza – Sentimientos
The symphonic metal landscape has the potential to be so much more than it actually is. Somehow, the bigger bands end up doing similar things: sacrificing complexity in the songwriting for more bombastic arrangements, the female vocals are clean and operatic, the male vocals are growled or screamed. Spain’s Stravaganzza…
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Album of the Week 25-2023: Jenner – To Live is to Suffer
It always makes me extremely happy to hear young bands who realize there is more to thrash metal than just speed and aggression. There just aren’t all that many who do. Serbia’s Jenner fortunately does and already manages to impress greatly on their debut album ‘To Live is to Suffer’.…
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Album of the Week 24-2023: Leather – We Are the Chosen
Human voices change with age. That is unavoidable. Singers adapt their voices or their parts to it, but in a full-force singing genre like heavy metal, there is often some loss of power. And singers with a bit of grit somehow tend to be the first to deteriorate. Not Leather…
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Album of the Week 23-2023: Mari Hamada – Soar
‘Soar’ is the most consistent Mari Hamada album in decades. While it features a similar elegant, bombastic power metal light style as her previous couple of albums, the songwriting is just better across the board, making ‘Soar’ a very entertaining listen throughout its entire runtime rather than just a couple…
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Album of the Week 21-2023: Metal Church – Congregation of Annihilation
Surely Kurdt Vanderhoof is one of the very few songwriters in heavy metal who writes material specifically to suit the voices of the singers he works with rather than the other way around. What other explanation is there for ‘Congregation of Annihilation’, the first Metal Church album with new singer…
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Album of the Week 18-2023: Burning Witches – The Dark Tower
Traditional heavy metal is a difficult field to stand out in. Even the better of the younger bands occasionally have moments that make you wish you were listening to the bands that inspired them instead. That used to be my exact opinion about Burning Witches: why would I listen to…
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Album of the Week 17-2023: Anthem – Crimson & Jet Black
Solid. Dependable. This may sound like a car commercial, but really, those adjectives describe Japanese heavy metal titans Anthem just as well. Since the early eighties, Anthem has been churning out quality heavy metal album after quality heavy metal album. Where many of their peers have had extended periods of…
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Album of the Week 16-2023: NoGoD – Now Testament
After their highly creative lead guitarist Kyrie left the band, I was not sure what to expect from NoGoD. Sure, they still had one of their greatests assets in the powerfully emotional vocals of Dancho – without a doubt one of the best singers in the visual kei scene –…
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Album of the Week 14-2023: OverKill – Scorched
Veteran thrash metal bands are in a curious position when it comes to new material. Their audiences don’t expect them to be as impressed by a new album as they were by their classic releases. It just needs to be good enough to keep the tour bus rolling for a…
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